"this person's not had enough of useless memories" - John Lydon, possibly misheard
In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his epigonic attempt to perpetuate 1967 ... Phil Knight mentioned that there was quite a bit of it - back-to-psychedelia (specifically English psychedelia) in the early-mid Eighties.... Television Personalities ... The Cleaners from Venus , The Monochrome Set... Quite a bit of it - indeed there was, indeed there was. Focused on the UK…
Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active - reckoned Robyn…
People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher. Only a slight exaggeration. It actually got a little wearisome and I had to start saying no. But then I seemed to get a second wind. Or maybe I just found it easier to comply than to write the note explaining why I couldn't. Here's some thoughts requested recently by a European journalist - I have no idea if she used them. Waste not…
Listen and watch here
A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!" Here's an interesting article by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor from a few weeks ago It starts with a electronic dance festival experience that feels blocked and static: But by some deadening alchemy, the sets smushed into a homogenous paste, largely indistinguishable in tempo and…
I have been worried that the brothers’s new effort has not received the amount of attention it deserves. So to boost its profile a bit, here is a little something I prepared earlier (actually for their label, local indie imprint Warp Records). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ We live in an age of over-exposure. Too many artists actively strip away their mystique, promoting a public persona first and the music a…
One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a. "everything is a remix", a.k.a. "copying is cool", a.k.a. "there's no such thing as originality" So it was funny to see this well-worn mission statement recycled in Whatever You Think Think the Opposite , a sort of motivational book of aphorisms + illustrations (an…
did an interview with a Swiss journo, no idea if he used the quotes... here they are (waste not want not as me old mum likes to say... another maxim of her's appears later) - Since we buy these CD boxes with all the extra tracks but rarely listen to those because there was a reason at the time to not publish them my question is: Do you see the power of the fetish at work here? I don't know if it's…
Dear Simon Reynolds, My name is ___________________ and I work with the programming team at BBC Radio 4, a nationally recognized Hot Adult Contemporary station reaching more than 1.39 million weekly listeners across the UK, with additional global reach through online streaming. We recently came across your book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, and were immediately drawn to its…
Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately. The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April - resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before. What did the poet say? The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil Dancersend was incandescent last…
Interesting piece at Split Infinities on a band that is getting talked about at the moment but written before all the are-they-or-aren't-they buzz "Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United…
"And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy."
Reading Charlie Warzel 's piece at The Atlantic about " monitoring the situation " - and specifically about a website that turns your screen into a situation room, with multiple ever-changing data feeds on the war and its economic repercussions - I thought of two prophetic bits of writing: Baudrillard, in " The Ecstasy of Communication ", 1982, on how the modern domestic space is effectively a…
Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the parish hall party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box . The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but clean…
I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a…
Bevis Frond addresses the Anxiety of Influence in song - appropriately using the most Oedipus Complex-obsessed, Norman O.Brown-stanning man in rock, Jim Morrison, although it's a different Jim who forever shadows his (re)creative efforts. "I took an album from the ancient unit And I walked on down the hall "Jimi, I want to kill you" He stood before me in a vision With treasured secrets of the…
Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962! This BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from…
Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800 The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: " the great national events which are daily taking place ... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies ", stirred up in…
Someone asked me what I meant by this term…. "Hyperstasis" is a concept I came up with after listening to a bunch of new electronic dance albums that had been hyped by music journalists, and having this mixed response: being quite impressed by the intelligence and diversity of the music, while ultimately being dissatisfied because nothing on the record ever really felt to me like it was "totally…
Historians of retro concur that the first time "retro" was used in its current way was in France in the early '70s, with the phrase mode rétro - the retro style - to describe a spate of historical films about France during World War 2, which then sparked a 1940s fashion revival. Here is an interview with Michel Foucault from July 1974 in which he caustically castigates the trend. It's from Cahiers…
"It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things…
Martin Ingle oblivious to the irony of banging on about an already banged-to-bits critique " regurgitating a past that never existed " - apart from that being a contradiction in terms (if it never existed, it could never be consumed in the first place, let alone puked up again for the re-eating), if that is actually what is going on, then it would be quite an interesting state of affairs.…
Kieran Press-Reynolds , in his Pitchfork column Rabbit Holed , interviews " Music Place , the bonkers archivist fighting against the sterility of music rec hubs today, creating a cursed but beautiful 'breadcrumb trail' across scenes and languages"
Field Music are one of those bands I don't have much of a fix on - I'd sort of mentally filed them as the kind of group Pitchfork habitually gives a good review to, alongside I dunno The Microphones / Mount Eerie (Actually looking into it they've had some pretty mixed reviews from P-Fork and they seem more like a British Dirty Projectors if anything). At any rate, not sure I've ever knowingly…
Product description: Hauntology - a massive 3.2Gb of organic electronic music samples from acclaimed composer and producer Si Begg. The library is full of amazing abstract, melodic and percussive loops as well as weird effects, sweeps and tonal textures. Via Dissensus's 0Bleak in this thread Here is what Si Begg says about the library: The aim of this library was to make a range of usable tools…